Yu 1

Joey Yu

Pino

English 11AP-1

4 August 2017

Annotated Bibliography

Hess, Amanda. Asian-American Actors Are Fighting for Visibility. They Will Not Be

Ignored. The New York Times. The New York Times, May 25, 2016. Accessed July 7,

2017.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/movies/asian-american-actors-are-fighting-for-visi

bility-they-will-not-be-ignored.html

This article is being written about the recent civil rights movement for the Asian-American

actors of Hollywood. Amanda Hess writes about actors and actresses like Daniel Dae Kim

and Lucy Liu (actors of Asian descent) and how they are mistreated in the industry because of

their race. This is largely taking place in America, where Hess writes that, Only 1.4% of lead

characters in a sample of studio films released in 2014 were Asian. This article also

addresses the controversy of whitewashing. Whitewashing is when the role/setting/story of a

movie or show is changed to portray the hero as a Caucasian instead of the original minority

they were written to be. Hess elaborates that this includes changing the name or identity of

the character, changing the setting of the story to a white culture society instead of the

minority culture, and casting a white actor/actress in a role of an Asian (or other minority)

character. She uses the film Aloha as an example of whitewashing. In the film, the lead

character was a quarter-Chinese, quarter-Hawaiian female named Allison Ng, played by the

white actress Emma Stone.

 Yu 2

This article does a good job of highlighting over the main points of controversy of this issue.

This source will allow me to pull quotes from famous Asian-American actors and actresses

who have first hand experience in the heart of this controversy. The source is from the New

York Times, which tends to lean liberal. Liberals in general seem to care more about racial

equality than their conservative counterparts. Amanda Hess, the author, is NOT an Asian-

American herself. However, she does seem to lean liberal, as she writes mainly for liberal

leaning publishers. She does seem to be a fairly well known and respected journalist (after a

Google search).